User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
On my second visit to Pat Bay it was unfortunately quite rainy and dreary to be outside. The time was at 10:00am and no one was around.
I have decided to study a relationship between the honey bees (Apis) and the blackberry bushes (Rubus) that line the bank and up by the hill. The gradient starts at the road and goes to the paved path that people walk along. From there the gradient turns to grass, with no blackberry bushes in sight, and then down to another path near the water bank. The bushes habitat that area around the water bank and end at the rocks down to the water edge. I have come up with two questions for a hypothesis:
- Would temperature/weather conditions affect the productivity of honey bees?
- Would blackberry bushes near the busy road not be as successful as the bushes closer to the water’s edge farther away from the road (humans)?
For my hypothesis I decided to go with:
Temperature and weather conditions affect the productivity of bees on blackberry bushes, ultimately affecting the final product (production of berries).
I predict that weather and temperature will affect the bees as they do not go out in colder weather and stigma’s on flowers do not stay receptive for long.
I have come up with a couple options for variables too that I have yet to decide which would be the best and most efficient to observe.
Response variable- # of bees in a time frame that are pollinating or amount of blackberries produced over the duration of the summer.
Predictor- weather/temperatures
Both variables are continuous.
